Love is all around

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Proud to be Romanian!

At 1st January 2007 Romania has joined European Union together with Bulgaria, expanding the union to 27 states. It is an historical moment in my view, taking into account how much time we have spent hoping for a better fate for this people and the 50 years of communism that kept Romania backwards compared with the rest of Europe. Let us not forget the restrictions in terms of freedom, the lack of access for basic things and fear.

Beyond the unavoidable short-term costs and benefits of this process, I see this integration as a major chance for Romania to rise from inertia, to rise up the standards for working and living. We have the chance to learn from western side of Europe how to be more efficient and to do business, in the same time keeping our genuine way of living in peace with nature and our valuable spirituality. It is our chance to attract back in Romania our lightened people in all fields and to transform our society, as in a similar way as in the interwar period, when Bucharest was the little Paris!

This hope should not let us close the eyes to the downside of current reality right now. We still have a lot of corruption at all levels and which is worse, a lot of acceptance for this phenomenon from everybody. Many people are still waiting for somebody else to come and ‘fix’ their problems and maybe offer them a job ‘on a plate’. The reality at countryside is very far away from Bucharest or other similar places of the EU in terms of infrastructure, investments and access to opportunities. To give just few examples…

Staying in Romania in the last period I got the chance to get more updated with the current reality and I saw many changes happening. This makes me continue to hope and encourages me to be eager to come back and work here. On this note I wanted to share with all of you my proposals for a very interesting campaign launched by Romanian Television called "Proud to be Romanian" around the integration, with my lovely niece and the current team of AIESEC Romania, both of them representing for me this hope and inspiration…